Yellow Violets-and Grieving Our Losses

When we first stepped foot on our land last year, we discovered yellow violets hidden here and there all over one spot of the hillside! I was enraptured! I LOVE violets! And yellow violets? I couldn’t believe it! It made me so happy to think that our new home would have yellow violets in its yard!

That was the hill side on which we chose to build our home. And guess what happened? The house went right where those yellow violets had been! The hillside was dug up, and instead of yellow violets this year, there is an unfinished house in the middle of a muddy hillside. 

 

Gumbo mud, no less. I know I should be grateful for the unfinished house.

And I am. 

And I should be grateful for the paschal flowers, early white flowers all over the place. And I am. But I am not particularly fond of paschal flowers. I miss the yellow violets, maybe because they reminded me of the beautiful woods of Pennsylvania where I grew up.

I mourned.

I know losing a few yellow violets shouldn’t be such a big thing. But to me, it was kind of a big thing. Jonathan suggested that maybe they just hadn’t bloomed yet. But I knew better. Those violets were gone for good, ever since the excavator had gobbled up the hillside. I looked and looked for yellow violets one evening, thinking that maybe I shouldn’t be feeling so sad, and yet there was a sense of grief that I just brought to the Lord. Only God knows how much I like small, humble, little, tender things–such as tiny, tender yellow violets. And how much it had meant to me to think that in our new home in the wilds of South Dakota (a place I had never dreamed of moving to) there would be yellow violets to cheer me.

But two mornings ago, on the very dewy path to the top of the hill where I had to go to get some signal for my phone, I saw something! It was a yellow flower! Opening to the morning sun was a tender yellow violet–right by the path! Just for me!

“Oh God!” I whispered, once again enraptured. This time I was not just enraptured by the sight of the tender violet, but by the thought that God cared enough about me to put that violet right by the path through the dewy grass–the path we’d created by walking to the top of the hill over and over for phone signal.

 And then later in the day, wouldn’t you know it, I suddenly found another plant with two violets! And then I discovered another one somewhere else. Jonathan might have been right after all. Perhaps after the late and deep snows, the violets just weren’t blooming as early as last year.

The apparent loss of the violets and then discovering them again brought a small grief and then a big joy to me. Lord, there are other griefs in our lives right now, and in the lives of our loved ones, so much bigger than not finding yellow violets anymore on our hillside. More than one marriage has been lost recently, health has been lost, souls are slipping over the brink into a Christless eternity. Lord, if You care about wee yellow violets on a grassy hillside, we know You care deeply about the needs that are so much greater. Please surprise Your people today with a turn-around in some grievous and seemingly hopeless circumstance! Let the sunny face of a yellow violet shimmering in the sunshine surprise someone with joy today!